


Ars Moriendi

by decathexis



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Child Murder, Death, Gen, Murder, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Suicide Notes, death anxiety
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:56:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decathexis/pseuds/decathexis
Summary: //The goal of this work is simple, yet frustratingly impossible to achieve: it's a desperate, fragmented, confused, and pleading examination of the reality of Death.//
Kudos: 2
Collections: Ars Moriendi





	1. Chapter One: If a Tree Falls in a Forest...

**Author's Note:**

> //  
> I'll try to include content warnings at the beginning of each chapter, if they apply.  
> //

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> //  
> Something happened in the dying forest of East Willow that November night. So did they all forget, or are they choosing not to remember?  
> //

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> //  
> This is a mature work that examines our human relationship with death; some of the content will be distressing in nature. Take care.  
> //  
> CW: Death  
> //

Panting breaths like cigarette smoke. He's new to this addiction. His lungs reject the burning air. Acrid, choked down by the mouthful for the slight buzz of nicotine, adrenaline, whatever the hell it is. He doesn't care. Packing the tobacco, packing the rustling foliage with pounding steps too frantic to enjoy the ritual. It hardly takes the edge off. They smell him from a mile away, buckle down on their cravings, hunt for something old and used and tosses aside to hold them over till the new cig slips out and they can grind this one into the asphalt for good. And so it goes. So it's always been.

They're hooked on the thrill. Every breath a desperate recitation of Psalm Forty, a broken sob for each inhale on the empty eleventh line, a choking gasp for each exhale that punctuates the shaking twelfth. They're catching up. He bows his head; in prayer or defeat, he doesn't know. Maybe neither. Maybe both. Either way, they're catching up.

The moon strikes twelve at the hour of reckoning and he feels like he might be sick. The leaves slip out from under his feet. He collapses in a heap of flaming death and tastes the rich wet earth softened by the iron tears slipping from his mouth. He bit his lip in the fall. And all the while they desecrate the sanctity of that sepulcher with the cracking of bones, the snapping of branches, the heavy weight of looming fury that grounds their steps into the whithered leaves. He wants this to be over. He wants this all to end.

_To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream._

Soft is the thought that overtakes the dying boy, caught in the twisting brambles of fragile life as the feral wolves beat it out of him. 

And so it goes. So it's always been. 


	2. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> //  
> No one moves to East Willow of their own accord; no one, that is, except the Ways. It's the beginning of their inevitable demise.  
> //

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> //  
> This is a mature work that examines our human relationship with death; some of the content will be distressing in nature. Take care.  
> //  
> CW: Death, (mentioned) Substance Abuse  
> //

The twilight falling fently from the boughs that give East Willow her spectral name taste of God's sorrowful tears, which one day will drown the whole damn world. 

And Gerard is glad to hear it. 

A bit of a cynic in the palest of lights, he keeps his eyes on his battered shsoes and stalks the long road home. The light of the autumn sun's premature setting seems colder than he remembers. The hazy wind that gnaws at the corners of his jacket shakes hands with the thoughts that chew away at his mind, so they meet in the middle to make his heart ache. 

It isn't supposed to be this way.

He knows the sun must be rising in some far-off land, which must itself suffer the hellfire of human mortality in its own time and by its own means; but that doesn't make the end of it all seem any further from him. Gerard could feel the creeping finality of the wind singing through the gapping hole in his chest. 

It isn't supposed to be this way. 

The quaint little suburb of Forest Springs has slaved away all its life just to exist now solely for Rosemary Lane. Pretty little parallel lines of Death's cheap plastic placeholders, single-story brick-faced houses rising up from manicured lawns that slope slightly to meet the cracked asphalt road, who on its shoulders bears Gerard. It's the rich part of town where kids look both ways before crossing the street that shoots sports cars at blossoming young disasters, seemgingly at random. They all know the truth, though. God doesn't send tragedy in the form of raging v8 engines at the troubled youth; that's a misfortune they concoct themselves. 

His phone buzzes faintly in his pocket. Gerard knows who it is before he even fishes it out. 

"Were you planning on coming home tonight?" Mikey snaps from the other end the second Gerard picks up.

"Relax. It's not even dark yet."

"Where are you?"

Gerard glances around him. _Good question. Where the hell am I?_

"Gerard?"

"Rosemary Lane," he says instead. 

"What the fuck?" Mikey yells, and Gerard pulls the phone away from his ear until his brother calms the hell down. "That's another forty minutes away _by car_. It'll be dark long before then, how the hell were you planning on getting home?"

"Same way I got here, I guess." He hopes Mikey can tell he's shrugging his shoulders as he says it. It pisses him off more when Gerard looks as flippant as he sounds. 

"Which is...?"

"Walking."

The line goes quiet long enough for the antsy silence to crawl up Gerard's spine, wriggle its way into his ears, and sing to the tune of sorrowful static that fills the supernova of all dying relationships. 

"Mikey?" he asks tenatively. He hates how small and helpless his voice sounds. 

"Stay where you are. I'm gonna come get you."

"What? No, that's stupid, I'll walk --"

"Sit the fuck down, Gerard, and wait for me to get there."

"Okay."

"Okay. Just wait there." He pauses, then adds under his breath, "Please."

Anger is a secondary emotion. That much is obvious, because the creaking weight on the bridge between Mikey's thoughts and words is crying out in protestation as a last-ditch effort to keep itself dry. He can't stay dry, he's tried that much before. So which is it this time, which drug of choice? Concern is pricey and usually cut through with some thrify-ass mixture of guilt and frustration. Gerard knows it when he sees it, and this isn't it. This is the cheap shit. This is the stuff Mikey smokes behind the school during study hall and doesn't even care if he gets caught; it's a minor offense at most. 

This is indignation. 

Gerard sighs and takes a seat on the cracked cement lining the storm drain at the end of someone's driveway. In the house across the street, the blinds on the front window twitch to the slight lilt of an invisible hand, before gently sliding back down again. He thinks he hears the door lock from the inside. He wonders if he should wave. Clearly, someone's watching him. 

Nothing to do and nowhere to go, and the minutes blend together like the oranges and reds and of the murdered sun bleeding out across the sky, withering as it lay dying. 

He stares back down at his dusty Converse. 

_As I lay dying._

The floodgate is opened and the words pour out, those memories coated in golden falsehoods and enshrined in sacred glass so sharply clear to the naked, shivering, terrified eye. What he wouldn't give to abandon the altars he's built to the ignorant past. 

"Memory believes before knowing remembers," he mumbles to himself. 

"What was that?"

His head shoots up in panicked surprise at the startling _something_ he has yet to define. He doesn't even know the boy who stands in front of him with his hands in the pocket of his black hoodie, swaying uneasily back and forth in the middle of the street. That doesn't keep him from hurriedly standing and defiantly meeting his eyes. He can't trust a damn soul in this town, and he knows it. He isn't going to be tricked into complacency. Not again. 

Not this time.

"What?" he says with a sharpened edge of challenge in his voice. Years have carefully refined and polished it to a threatening point. 

"I..." The boys falters, clearly not expecting to be met with such blatant animosity. "I just asked what you said."

"I was talking to myself," Gerard admits, before silently cursing himself because of how strange it sounds. The boy seems to relax a bit. Dammit. 

"What did you say?" he continues with genuine curiosity. "It sounded kinda weird."

Gerard sighs. "'Memory believes before knowing remembers.' It's from William Faulkner, _As I Lay Dying_."

"Oh. I've never read it."

They stand in silence drawn out as long and thing as the furthest reaches of the galaxy in which they all laugh and cry and hope and dream, and ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of tiny specks and collapsing stars. It makes him feel so small. 

"So..." The boys pushes his curly mane out of his eyes as the frosty wind dances down the street. "You're new here, right?"

"What gave it away?" Gerard scoffs. He's only half joking. 

"I just haven't seen you around before, especially not in this part of town."

_The rich part of town. The part for all the wealthy, thieving, lying bastards._

The boy's face flushes red as he realizes the implications of what he's just said. "I didn't mean it like that," he blurts out. 

"No, it's fine. You're right, anyway." Gerard shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He doesn't know it they're trembling from rage or nerves, and he doesn't care to know. They're one and same, really, producing the same result in him. 

Anger is a secondary emotion, after all.

"But it still sounded rude," the boy insists. For someone so embarrassed by his own words, he seems awfully reluctant to drop the subject. "I mean, you _are_ new here though, right?"

The Earth seems new to the rickety bones that hold up the ancient universe; time is relative, time is a joke.

Most people don't think like this. 

"Yeah," he says simply. "I moved here with my mom and brother last month."

"Last _month_?" the boy repeats incredulously. "You go to school, right? Why haven't I seen you around school?"

Gerard shrugs. "It's only, what, two weeks into the semester?"

"Still." The boy holds out a hand. "Ray Toro."

He's reluctant to bridge the gap between them; something about a handshake seems too permanent, too binding for him. There was a long time ago when Aristotle said that each person is changed by the object of their sense perception; it becomes a part of them. Touch is no different, perhaps the most definite of all, a physical alteration of life as he knows it entombed in the graveyard of his temporary flesh and bones. 

He doesn't shake Ray's hand. 

Ray awkwardly puts his hand back in his hoodie pocket, masking his looking away from Gerard with a glance down the street. 

"So, uh, you got a name?" he asks awkwardly. 

"Gerard."

Ray nods, still staring off at the darkening stretch of asphalt that runs until it disappears into the forested hills and the inky shroud that shifts beneath their boughs. "Cool name."

"Thanks." It's fucking embarrassing. The little mites are back again, eating away at the silence, feasting themselves to gorey bursting. He can't stand it. "Well, I'm gonna be on my way. 

This seems to strike a chord in Ray, and he shifts uncomfortably before saying, "Where? Are you walking? Alone? It's getting pretty dark, man --"

"Yeah, I'll be fine."

_What is it with this kid? No one else in this godforsaken town gives a solitary fuck._

_Probably because Ray gives them all._

"Are you sure? I can drive you if you want?"

That's the last thing he wants. He's already supposed to be waiting on Mikey; one heavy silence laced with meaningless conversation later, and the whole plan's changed. He'll meet Mikey on the road later on. It isn't his brother's place to be bossing him around anyway, just because he's taking his sweet old time in falling apart. It isn't right; Gerard is supposed to be there for him. He's supposed to be older and wiser and strong enough for both of them. He's supposed to be able to keep him safe. 

It isn't supposed to be this way.

So he'll meet Mikey on the road, and they'll argue about it in the car on the way home, and everything will be just like it used to. 

"No, it's fine. I'll walk," he assures Ray. "Thanks though."

"See you at school Monday?" Ray asks hopefully, after Gerard's already turned to walk away.

"Uh... Yeah, I guess." He's paused in the middle of the road, the two of them facing down like cowboys in one of those old western films blanketed in black and white. Maybe a car will shoot around the corner. Maybe one of them won't leave this road alive. Maybe one of them can't.

Maybe one of them shouldn't. 

But the cars stay far away and eerily silent, and Gerard realizes he's still standing there in the road as the presence of cold-handed death creeps through his skin. "Yeah. See you at school."

And he turns on his heel and strides off, feeling Ray's eyes on the back of his head. What that boy wouldn't give to know his thoughts. What _he_ wouldn't give to know his own thoughts, in the plain light of day and not as the world is fading to black, and consciousness is fading to sleep, and life is finally succumbing to death, and all the words echo just a little too loud inside his head. 


End file.
